| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Under the Red Robe by Stanley Weyman: him,' I said, after a pause
'He has been into the village,' she answered.
I longed to pursue the matter further; but though she seemed to
entertain no suspicion of me, I dared not run the risk. I tried
her, instead, on another tack.
'Mademoiselle de Cocheforet does not seem very well to-day?' I
said.
'No?' she answered carelessly. 'Well, now you speak of it, I do
not think that she is. She is often anxious about--one we love.'
She uttered the last words with a little hesitation, and looked
at me quickly when she had spoken them. We were sitting at the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale: And hands to make his hands rejoice,
But to my lover I must be
Only a voice.
Oh, there are breasts to bear his head,
And lips whereon his lips can lie,
But I must be till I am dead
Only a cry.
Gifts
I gave my first love laughter,
I gave my second tears,
I gave my third love silence
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: deny to Being all predicates. The Megarians, who succeeded them, like the
Cynics, affirmed that no predicate could be asserted of any subject; they
also converted the idea of Being into an abstraction of Good, perhaps with
the view of preserving a sort of neutrality or indifference between the
mind and things. As if they had said, in the language of modern
philosophy: 'Being is not only neither finite nor infinite, neither at
rest nor in motion, but neither subjective nor objective.'
This is the track along which Plato is leading us. Zeno had attempted to
prove the existence of the one by disproving the existence of the many, and
Parmenides seems to aim at proving the existence of the subject by showing
the contradictions which follow from the assertion of any predicates. Take
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